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Sunday, November 20, 2016

Some Award-Winning Australian Literature

Last week, the winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Australia were
announced.

The annual awards,
established in 2007, were designed as "a new initiative celebrating the
contribution of Australian literature to the nation's cultural and intellectual
life." There are four categories
(fiction, non-fiction, young adult, children’s fiction, and Australian
history); each category winner receives $80,000, making it Australia's richest
literary award in total. The awards are open to works written by Australian citizens
and permanent residents for books first published in the calendar year prior to
the awards.

The fiction
prize was split between two authors, The
Life of Houses by Lisa Gorton and The
Natural Wayof Things by
Charlotte Wood.

The Life of Houses:This
novel explores the hidden tensions in an old established Australian family that
has lived for generations in a large house in a coastal town in south-eastern
Australia. These tensions come to the surface when the granddaughter Kit is
sent by her mother to spend a holiday with her grandparents, and the unmarried
aunt who looks after them, in their old and decaying house by the sea. Kit
barely knows them, because her mother is estranged from the family and never
talks to or visits them. Recently divorced from Kit’s father, she sends her
daughter to her parents now so she can pursue an affair with her new lover.
Kit’s presence brings the old quarrels to life as family memories take hold of
the present, brought to a flashpoint by the anger and resentment of Kit and her
mother, and the dementia and sudden illness of her grandparents.

The Natural Way of Things:Drugged, dressed in old-fashioned rags, and fiending for a cigarette,
Yolanda wakes up in a barren room. Verla, a young woman who seems vaguely
familiar, sits nearby. Down a hallway echoing loudly with the voices of
mysterious men, in a stark compound deep in the Australian outback, other
captive women are just coming to. Starved, sedated, the girls can't be sure of
anything—except the painful episodes in their pasts that link them.

Charlotte
Wood depicts a world where a woman's sexuality has become a weapon turned against
her. The characters, each marked by their own public scandal, are silenced and
shackled by a cruel system of corporate control and misogyny. In a Kafkaesque
drag of days marked only by the increasing strangeness of their predicament,
the fraught, surreal, and fierce reality of inhabiting a female body becomes
frighteningly vivid.

But it's in
the very bind of this senseless system that Yolanda and Verla discover their
ability to forge a bond powerful enough to bring it down. Drawing strength from
the animal instincts they're forced to rely on, the girls go from hunted to
hunters, along the way becoming unforgettable and boldly original literary
heroines that readers will both relate to and root for.

Here I will post reviews of books I have just finished reading and news items and articles of interest. All discussions will be related to books and reading. There will be no advertising since I'm not interested in making money, just sharing.

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“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

― Jane Austen

About Me

I'm a retired English teacher/teacher-librarian who, after 30 years, left the classroom and became a copyeditor and book reviewer. Reading has always been my passion and now, in our new home, I have, thanks to my husband, the library of my dreams. For many years, before I retired and moved, I belonged to THE Timmins Book Club which is one of the oldest in North America, with minutes dating back to 1938; I submitted an article about us and it was featured on the LitLovers.com website: http://www.litlovers.com/featured-clubs/timmins-book-club. Now I'm trying to start a global book club of sorts with my blog: http://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/.